From the “God Particle” to Data Markets: the unseen commercialization of Big Science
There’s a strange cocktail at the core of the technological world:
a blend of absolute ambition and absolute delusion.
It’s the same force that pushed Europe to build the largest particle accelerator in human history — and the same one that now funnels billions into startups with no product, no market, and no real path to either.
A force that shapes Silicon Valley, CERN, Elon Musk, the venture-capital universe, and the global tech leadership class.
And the question behind all of it is always the same:
Was it worth it?
Through a cost–benefit lens:
No energy problem was solved.
No breakthrough justified the scale of investment.
No new practical technology transformed everyday life.
No radical shift in our understanding of the universe occurred — just confirmation of what we already believed was likely true.
The scientific output: brilliant — but limited
CERN delivered one monumental gift:
the experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson — one of the most elegant pieces of the Standard Model finally found its place.
But beyond that?
The grand promises of “new physics,” new particles, extra dimensions, dark matter solutions, even energy revolutions… remain promises.
Through a cost–benefit lens:
No energy problem was solved.
No breakthrough justified the scale of investment.
No new practical technology transformed everyday life.
No radical shift in our understanding of the universe occurred — just confirmation of what we already believed was likely true.
The Higgs discovery is like expecting to read the book of human nature and instead confirming the first letter.
Important? Yes.
Proportionate to the investment? No.
CERN’s real contribution: not the what, but the how
CERN is no longer a “research project.”
It is infrastructure — scientific, computational, geopolitical.
What it actually achieved is far larger than the Higgs:
- Cutting-edge data-acquisition technologies
- Advances in cryo-engineering
- Massive high-performance computing architectures
- A new blueprint for international collaboration
- A European foothold in global tech
- Tens of thousands of scientists trained in computational physics and engineering
In a way, CERN is to Europe what NASA was to the United States:
a grand excuse to fund infrastructures that would never be funded otherwise.
The cost no press release mentions: human, social, existential
Anyone who has stood close to Big Science knows there is a silent graveyard behind every big project.
CERN:
- burned out minds and lives
- shattered personal trajectories
- turned young researchers into disposable postdocs
- created small scientific elites and large circles of exclusion
- built a bureaucratic priesthood around physics
These people never “get the investment back.”
The budget doesn’t record the cost.
They pay it themselves.
Geopolitics: CERN is not a lab — it’s a strategy
Europe knew exactly what it was doing.
The investment wasn’t only for particle physics. It was to:
- stop the brain-drain to the U.S.
- maintain prestige in global knowledge production
- build R&D ecosystems
- keep high-tech industries inside Europe
Seen through this lens, the project becomes rational:
CERN is a form of European soft power —
a scientific Parthenon: not “useful,” but symbolically and institutionally necessary.
The deep-tech startup parallel: same architecture, different tools
Deep-tech funding operates under the same internal logic:
- Money does not fund the product.
- Money does not fund the technology.
- Money funds the story.
VC money is not “the economy.” It is expectation capital:
- pension funds hunting returns
- sovereign funds buying prestige
- VCs chasing hype
- investors betting on the 1% that will explode
The model is cold:
9 out of 10 startups will die — and that is built into the design.
A fund’s entire performance comes from the single outlier.
Technology, people, and products often stand second to the narrative.
Just like CERN, deep-tech follows the pattern:
massive investment → small real output → large institutional gain
The two contemporary religions: Big Science & Big Hype
The resemblance is uncanny:
- colossal promises
- gigantic budgets
- modest returns
- exhausted humans
- narrative-driven funding
- prestige for the few
- costs absorbed by the many
- moral and social distance from real life
Big Science promises “new physics.”
Big Startups promise “new economies.”
Both promise transformation —
both deliver infrastructure.
Useful, important — but far smaller than the words used to sell them.
The greatest myth of our era: Mars
“Let’s go to Mars” is the most successful hype-machine in modern history.
Not because it’s happening.
Not because it’s feasible.
But because it is the perfect myth: digestible, commercializable, viral.
Reality:
- Mars cannot support human life
- the technologies do not exist
- radiation, atmosphere, materials — nothing is ready
- no economic model makes sense
Mars is not a program.
It is a televised narrative, financed by the same mechanism:
money buying mythology, not outcomes.
The truth behind the glare: progress is never where the spotlight points
The real technological world is the one that never goes viral:
- AI that took 30 years of computational evolution
- data infrastructures built slowly and painfully
- technologies that burn people, not just electricity
- scientists who give their lives to research
- infrastructures that change the world but don’t photograph well
Progress — for better or worse — is never clean.
It is a mixture of ideas, money, ego, sacrifice,
and people burning themselves for a future they will never see. Without big narratives, there are no big infrastructures.
The paradox: CERN didn’t create a new era — it created the floor beneath the next one
CERN did not deliver new physics.
But it built the computational culture that made modern AI possible.
No CERN → no massive-compute paradigm → no large models.
The real return on Big Science appears 20–30 years later —
and societies have no patience for that.
So, was it worth it?
Yes — but not for the reasons we were told.
Yes — but not at the scale we were promised.
Yes — and also no.
Because:
- CERN was too expensive.
- The human cost was enormous.
- The scientific yield was smaller than the myth.
- Deep-tech hype follows the same logic.
- The Mars project is a collective hallucination.
- Societies pay; elites get the prestige.
But…
- Without CERN, Europe would be a spectator.
- Without deep-tech funds, innovation would crawl at the pace of decades.
- Without big myths, no one would build big infrastructures.
Progress is never clean.
It is always a blend of idealism, money, narcissism, sacrifice —
and people who burn themselves for a world they won’t live to see.
Maybe that — ultimately —
is the price of every great human attempt.
